Hollow Mountain (18 page)
Authors: Thomas Mogford
A noise comes from outside, a key turning in the lock. ‘You’ve been such a good boy,’ I hear, ‘let’s not spoil it now . . .’
My hand darts into the cupboard and grabs a coil of rope. The yellow hemp feels slimy but the strength is excellent.
Childish chatter in the kitchenette, then her voice again, ‘Charlie! You finished your puzzle and I didn’t even see . . .’
I wait until she puts a record on the player – tasteless American crooning – then make my entrance.
Spike paced the strip-lit corridors of the hospital, mind shooting off in different directions, finding connections between events previously assumed disparate. The same nurse sat at the desk, this time occupied by form-filling rather than Facebook. ‘He returns,’ she said with an attempt at a dazzling smile.
‘Did Peter have a briefcase with him?’
Her face fell. ‘Sorry?’
‘When he was admitted to hospital. Do you know if he had a briefcase?’
The nurse gave an anxious look. ‘I’d have to check the property room . . .’
Spike could see her poised to object. ‘He named me as next of kin. Along with his sister.’
She slowly stood. At least some of her concern was directed towards his hand, he realised, which was clamped to his chest, still throbbing from Jardine’s pincer grip. Spike forced himself to release it. ‘There’s a meeting tomorrow with the consultant,’ he said. ‘I promised Peter’s sister I’d go through his belongings in advance.’ He paused. ‘Just in case.’
The nurse gave a nod, then picked up a key card and hung it around her neck. ‘Just don’t terrorise any more of our patients, OK?’
Spike waited until she was gone, then stepped into the ward. Peter was still the only patient; Spike gave his prostrate form a nod, then knelt down by his bed, checking for a cardboard box or suitcase. Nothing but a softening butter sachet coated in dust. He dropped it in the bin marked ‘Clinical Waste’ then drew up a chair.
The bandage on Peter’s head had been removed, revealing a mustard-coloured bruise on his brow with a deep black cut in the centre, held together by three ugly surgical stitches. His beard had thickened and his body seemed to take up less space on the bed. Spike glanced at the wheeled sideboard and saw the flowers he’d brought on his last visit still languishing. ‘Something’s going on, Pete,’ he said. ‘Something to do with Simon Grainger.’ Galliano was looking away; Spike reached over and gently rolled his face towards him. His left eye was weeping, welded closed, but the right was open a fraction, lids trembling slightly.
‘Pete?’ Spike said, hearing his voice rise in expectation. He caught a sourness to his friend’s breath as he leaned in. Was that a good sign? Then his eyelids stilled, and Spike realised it was probably just a dream, or some automatic reflex.
Sitting back, Spike lowered his head into his hands and thought out loud. ‘Did Simon Grainger tell you he’d found the
Flos Sanctus Montis
? Did he want to salvage the wreck without cutting in Neptune?’ The grind of Galliano’s ventilator was worse than silence. ‘Did Jardine know something? Did he come to the office with a bottle of rum?’
A noise came from behind. ‘I said talk
to
him, not at him,’ the nurse called out with a sympathetic smile. Hooked over her shoulder was a bulky white plastic bag marked GHA – Gibraltar Health Authority.
Spike stood and took the bag. ‘May I have a bit of time in private with him?’
The nurse looked a little hurt. ‘There’s a form you need to fill in if you want to take that away.’
‘Understood. Thank you.’
Alone again, Spike swung the bag onto the adjacent bed. A brown paper tag with Galliano’s name, hospital number and admission date was attached to its string handle. Spike emptied out the contents: stiff black brogues, scuffed with mud; suit trousers, vast around the waist; jacket and a tent-sized white shirt with dried blood on the breast. Something hard lay in the corner of the bag: Spike pulled out a clear zip-loc baggie containing a phone, wallet, keys, two packs of ultralight cigarettes, half a tube of Extra Strong Mints . . . He tried the phone but the battery was dead. No briefcase. Saddened by the faint aroma of Peter’s cologne, he began carefully to fold up the clothes. As he smoothed down the jacket, he felt something crinkle beneath the cotton. He smiled: only Peter was a large enough man to carry an entire document in his inside pocket. Reaching inside, he drew out a white A4 envelope. Seeing the crest of the Garrison Library on the front, he felt something flutter in his stomach, something he hadn’t felt in a while. Hope, maybe. He slid out a stapled document, a thin facsimile copy of a ledger table. At the top, in italic writing, was a date – 11th February 1736 – and a title beside it,
El Manifiesto del Barco ‘Flos Sanctus Montis’
.
Spike carried the ship’s manifest towards the window. The glow that emanated from the smokers’ courtyard was brighter than the halogen bulb on the ceiling. The Spanish text was still almost impossible to decipher. Either the facsimile was out of focus – it looked to have been made at the very advent of the technology – or the original manifest had been blurred. Either way, Spike spent too long trying to establish the principal goods on board, only to discover that he was actually looking at the ship’s departure point, Montevideo – in present-day Uruguay presumably – and intended destination, Málaga.
The ledger had a number of early entries that Spike couldn’t understand, but he started to feel more at ease when he translated a line confirming the presence of forty-two carcasses of
lomo saltado
– salted beef. Evidently the
Holy Flower of the Mountain
had been a fairly substantial vessel.
A few more mysterious entries, then a final one that caught his eye, mostly because he’d heard the phrase so recently. ‘
Pesos de ocho
’. He switched his fingertip to the column marked ‘Quantity’. The number was clear – 42,300. ‘Forty-two thousand, three hundred pieces of eight,’ he said aloud. ‘Bloody hell.’
Spike thought about the ship’s bell sitting in Amy’s cupboard and the old bronze coin beside it. Wherever Simon Grainger had found that bell, thousands of other coins were likely to be lying nearby.
He took out his phone and called her landline. No reply: probably putting Charlie down, or whatever the phrase was. On a whim, he tried her husband’s mobile. No such number – probate had finally closed down the account.
As he pocketed his phone, he turned and saw that Peter was facing him now, eyes still closed, mouth agape. Spike had been sitting on the other side of the bed before and had eased Peter’s head towards him. How could he be looking now in the opposite direction?
He stepped towards the prone body of his friend, then heard footsteps outside and called out, ‘I think he just moved!’ Just before the nurse appeared, he grabbed the plastic bag and slipped the manifest inside.
The nurse glanced from Spike to the possessions still laid out on the bed. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Can you get the doctor?’
‘What about all that stuff?’
‘Everything’s accounted for . . . I’ll be back tomorrow.’
Plastic bag in hand, Spike strode past the nurse for the door, unable, for a moment, to keep the smile from his face.
The levanter was really blowing now, sweeping in from the east, its passage over the Mediterranean gobbling up billions of drops of warm water to exhale vaporously over the Rock. Window frames shook, palm fronds crackled, the locals barricaded themselves into their houses for the night. Of the apes which had been strutting around town earlier there was no sign.
Head lowered, Spike battled his way into Upper Castle Gulley, seeing the mist rolling ominously down the foothills of the Rock. With Peter’s plastic hospital bag flapping violently in the wind, he stopped to check his phone and was reassured to find no new messages. A deflated beach football blew out of the sports cage of Keightley House; he punted it back inside, then shouldered open the door to Block C, feeling a sense of relief as it slammed closed behind him.
The ground-floor lights hummed. Spike checked Amy’s pigeonhole and found it empty. She must be at home, at least.
There was no noise from the flats he passed, just the wind wailing outside as moonlight flickered through the landing windows, casting shadows over the wall tiles of the occupants’ favoured saints.
On the sixth floor, Spike paused to look out of the broken window. Beneath O’Hara’s Battery, the wind was toying with the Rock scrub, flattening its foliage like an animal’s fur. As he climbed to the top floor, he felt something give beneath his foot. He looked down and saw the upturned sole of a slipper. The soft-toy snout of a monkey grinned up.
‘Amy?’ Spike called up the stairs.
He edged to the open stairwell and peered up. The lights were all off. He was about to continue his climb, when he saw something move above him, then heard a slow, deep creak.
‘Charlie?’ he shouted, feeling a wave of anxiety for the boy which surprised him.
The movement came again, swaying through the empty space, silent and ghostly, like a barn owl changing perch.
‘Who’s there?’
Eyes still drawn upwards, Spike moved rapidly up the stairs. Out on the Rock, a more powerful burst of wind shrieked through the jagged crags. As the noise faded, Spike heard the creak again, like a ship’s mooring under stress. He rounded the corner to the last flight of stairs, fear tightening his chest. A yard in front, suspended at chest height, dangled a pale, naked foot. Swinging beside it was a slipper. Spike stopped, puzzled, then lifted his eyes higher and saw Amy Grainger hanging by her neck from the top-floor banisters.
He blinked, trying to take in what he was seeing. Amy wore the same stripy T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms as the night before last. Tight beneath her chin was a noose of thick yellow rope.
Rushing forward, Spike reached up to grab her legs. He tried to push her up from below, but failed to get a purchase. Her other slipper fell, tumbling down the gap in the stairwell and alighting delicately on the lower landing.
Spike focused on breathing as he tried to think, then forced himself to let go of her legs, sickened to feel the weight return to her neck. Sprinting up the last flight of stairs, he slid over the lino on his knees and pushed his arms painfully through the banisters to hook her shoulders from above. He heaved upwards, noticing a small red welt on the side of her neck, seeing the dream he’d had about Zahra flash before his eyes as he mustered all his strength and pulled. He was just about holding her weight when he saw her head loll forward feebly in its noose. ‘Help!’ he called out. ‘Please! Somebody help me.’
Arms trembling uncontrollably, he inched his mouth towards her small delicate face. ‘It’s OK,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘I’ve got you.’
His knees were sliding forward, so he shifted position, seeing her neck tip to the side, chin at a strange angle. Her eyes were half open; he felt an unbearable need to close them. ‘Help!’ he yelled again, then heard a door open below as a large man in a grimy vest peered up the stairwell.
‘Jesus God!’ Spike heard as the man vanished around the flight of stairs. Slow breaths, then heavy footsteps, and Spike was aware of someone standing above him. ‘Come in behind me,’ he said, catching a smell of crisps and old sweat. ‘Grab her shoulders.’ He felt soft flabby arms pressing over him, clasping Amy’s shoulders; now they were both heaving her upwards, rolling her legs over the banisters, chin still slumped to her collarbone, noose finally slack enough for Spike to lift it over her head.
They laid her carefully down on the landing floor. ‘Call an ambulance,’ Spike said to the man, then knelt beside Amy, placing his mouth on the same lips he’d kissed just forty-eight hours before. He blew in and out, pressing her chest with his hands. Above, he heard the fat man talking rapidly in
yanito
to an operator. Spike kept going for a long time after he’d realised it was over, then sat back on his heels, eyes stinging. It was then that he noticed that the front door to the Graingers’ flat was open.
‘Charlie?’
The lights in the flat were out; Spike flicked them on one by one, frantically looking for the baby monitor. It sat on the kitchen table, the LED green, a tinny rendition of a nursery rhyme emanating eerily from the speakers.
He ran from the kitchenette to the hall, stopping by a white door with ‘Charlie’s Room’ marked in uneven multicoloured stickers on the front. He pushed it open. The cot was empty, a bedraggled toy rabbit propped against the bars.
Back on the landing, the fat man was kneeling over Amy’s body, palms pressed together in prayer. Spike grabbed Peter’s hospital bag. ‘How long did they say?’
‘Three minutes,’ the man replied.
He returned to the flat and gave one last cry, ‘Charlie?’, then stopped, drained and hopeless. Wrenching open the storage cupboard, he saw that the coil of ship’s rope was missing. The coin and bell were still on the shelf; he hesitated, then swept them into his bag, placing the envelope containing the ship’s manifest on top. Voices now, urgent shouting from the stairs.
The first paramedic appeared on the landing, dropping to his knees then testing Amy’s pulse. Her face was almost blue. Spike took a step backwards and checked his phone. No new messages. When he looked back up, DS Jessica Navarro was standing in front of him.